Kacey Musgraves is spending her current tour perched on a giant testicle-shaped disco ball, and a Brooklyn artist says she made the same thing in 2020.
The Grammy-winning country star’s prop has become a viral moment. Musgraves sat on the slowly spinning sculpture for two nights at Madison Square Garden, singing “Rhinestoned” to a sold-out crowd of 20,000, as part of her 36-date Middle of Nowhere Tour.
But Brooklyn artist Alexandra Rubinstein saw the videos and recognized her own work. On August 22, she posted photos of her 2020 sculpture “Disco Balls” on Instagram with the caption: “It’s true I made them first (maybe, who knows it’s all been done).”
Rubinstein’s 2020 sculpture
Rubinstein told Hyperallergic that she quickly learned of Musgraves’s use of remarkably similar, albeit much larger, disco balls in her tour, “as people often send [her] all these balls.”
The artist made “Disco Balls” from a mold she had previously used to create a testicle-shaped piñata. That piñata was part of her 2020 solo show Dick Diaries at Established Gallery.
The piñata’s message
The piñata was filled with “plastic babies, blue and pink candles, and condoms,” Rubinstein said. Its meaning was pointed.
“The piñata was about bringing attention to the cis male role in pregnancy and reproduction at a time when Trump had filled the Supreme Court with conservative judges, while also playing on the trope of a ball-busting feminist,” she said.
Rubinstein’s broader practice includes signature paintings of oversized phalluses, which she views “as stand-in symbols for traditional masculinity.” Her “Disco Balls” fit that same tongue-in-cheek approach to the patriarchal establishment.
A longer lineage
Musgraves’s disco ball moment fits into a longer art history of testicle imagery, from Paleolithic cave art to the present. Users on Rubinstein’s Instagram post replied with quips like “Who said disco was dead?” and “Testicle spectacle.”
Artist Mike Glier commented that Rubinstein’s work resonated with Louise Bourgeois’s testicular sculpture series Janus, minus the disco mirrors.
Tour and show numbers
- Musgraves’s tour: 36 dates, kicked off in Chicago on August 20
- Madison Square Garden shows: two nights, sold-out crowd of 20,000
- Rubinstein’s “Disco Balls”: made in 2020
- Dick Diaries: 2020 solo show at Established Gallery
Rubinstein’s work and Musgraves’s stage prop share a visual language, though the country star’s version is far larger. The tour continues through its remaining dates, with Musgraves performing on the spinning sculpture night after night. Rubinstein’s work has found a new audience.
Source: hyperallergic.com
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